Yahoo Autos The Mysterious Death of the First Man in Space
On April 12, 1961-55 years ago today-Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched into the great beyond, becoming the first human in space. When he came back to Earth, Gagarin was looked upon as not just a hero, but the very embodiment of the Soviet Union's power. Streets were named after him. Monuments were erected. Khrushchev called him the Russian Christopher Columbus.
And then he was gone.
Less than seven years after his history-making mission, Gagarin died in a plane crash at only 38 years old. The cosmonaut and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin were flying a routine training exercise when they were lost, and the mysterious circumstances of the wreck have inspired a half-century of wild speculation. With little more than Soviet-sponsored reports, KGB investigations, and long withheld testimony as explanations, conspiracy theories sprung up to explain why a plane piloted by two experienced Russian airmen suddenly just fell out of the sky. So what really happened to the first man in space?
In a Flash
There are things we know conclusively about Yuri Gagarin's final moments. He awoke early on March 27, 1968 to continue his "retraining" as a fighter pilot. (Prior to his days as a cosmonaut he had been a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force, so this was a formality.) Gagarin was stationed at Chkalovsky Airport, about 20 miles northeast of Moscow. By all accounts, his retraining was going well. Gagarin was scheduled to fly three practice missions in a Russian-built MiG-15 training jet that day-two solo and one with Seryogin, which was the day's first flight.
"It was not their fault. They were following the instructions to the letter."
It was a rainy and windy morning when he boarded a bus on bound for the airfield and realized he was missing his identification. Always superstitious, Gagarin told the people around him this was a bad omen. A little after 10 a.m., Gagarin and Seryogin took off in the two-seater jet and headed to the flight zone in weather conditions that were probably deteriorating. A few minutes later, Gagarin came over the radio to say he'd completed the exercise, which included barrell rolls and vertical loops, and was heading back to base.
Then, radio silence.
After ten minutes of no sighting or communication with the aircraft, the base dispatched rescue teams to seek the jet. Around 3 p.m., crews found the burning, charred plane among the trees and snow of the Russian countryside. The accident looks unsurvivable. While Seryogin's body was identified, there was hope that Gagarin had ejected before impact. That hope dissipated the next day when Gagarin's remains were found not far from the plane's wreckage. His ashes were buried alongside other Soviet luminaries along the Kremlin Wall.
With the world mourning, Soviet authorities hastily assembled a commission to determine the cause of the crash. In November of 1968, the USSR's State Commission filed a 29-volume investigative report that was basically inconclusive. Proposing several theories but never providing irrefutable evidence for any of them, the report said the pilots probably swerved to avoid hitting a weather balloon or a bird, which caused them to go into a tailspin from which they never recovered. In other words, it was pilot error, not a systematic or mechanical problem. Shortly thereafter, Communist party head Leonid Brezhnev closed the investigation and deemed it top secret. The people who investigated and wrote the report were told not to publish their own conclusions because it could "unsettle" the nation.
Drunks, Double Agents, and UFOs
A national hero dies under mysterious circumstances. The report can't pin down a reason. A restrictive government seals the results. It's the perfect recipe for conspiracy theories, and Gagarin's death inspired ideas that persisted for decades, some more plausible than others.
One said Gagarin was drunk. Another proposed that he and Seryogin were joy-riding and taking potshots at deer below. A persistent rumor was that Gagarin was sabotaged by Brezhnev, jealous of the cosmonaut's popularity. Maybe a UFO encounter caused the crash (no doubt fueled by Gagarin supposed belief in them).
